Obama issues order to help states deal with climate damage
By: Darren Goode November 4, 2013 05:04 AM EST

President Barack Obama has issued an executive order aimed at helping federal agencies and states build roads, bridges and other infrastructure to withstand stronger storms and the growing damage caused by climate change.

The move comes a year after Hurricane Sandy ravaged the East Coast and is the latest by the White House to address climate change through executive branch powers rather than seeking to push legislation through Congress, where opposition to climate change measures has stalled even modest measures.

The order, issued Friday, instructs federal agencies to help states to “identify and seek to remove or reform barriers that discourage investments or other actions to increase the Nation’s resilience to climate change.” That includes helping to ensure roads, bridges and other infrastructure financed at least in part by federal dollars could better withstand the impacts of climate change.

The executive order comes as work continues on Obama’s broader climate agenda, including first EPA greenhouse gas controls on power plants that has become a wedge issue in some of 2014’s key congressional and gubernatorial races.

The order emphasizes the environment is an issue that Obama can act on on in his second term without the assistance of a divided Congress — even as he looks to help Democrats regain control of Congress and win gubernatorial races in states like Virginia.

It sets up a new interagency Council on Climate Preparedness and Resilience, involving 20 departments, agencies and other federal offices that will be co-chaired by the chair of the Council on Environmental Quality, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism.

It also establishes a “climate preparedness and resilience” task force of federal, state and local officials to make recommendations to Obama within one year to “remove barriers, create incentives, and otherwise modernize Federal programs to encourage investments, practices, and partnerships that facilitate increased resilience to climate impacts, including those associated with extreme weather.”

The task force will include the seven Democratic governors representing Hawaii, California, Washington state, Delaware, Maryland, Illinois and Vermont and the Republican governor of Guam. Local officials include mayors, commissioners and officials from several cities and tribes across the country.

An initial interagency climate change adaptation task force set up in 2009 will be terminated under Friday’s order.

The executive order also directs several federal departments and agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency and the Defense and Interior departments, toconduct and assess within nine months any changes needed in land and water policies “necessary to make the Nation’s watersheds, natural resources, and ecosystems, and the communities and economies that depend on them, more resilient in the face of a changing climate.”

Obama’s executive order “is an important step forward in our efforts to protect against the anticipated consequences of climate change, helping the Department of Energy and our federal counterparts strengthen partnerships with state, local and tribal communities to build a more resilient energy infrastructure.”